Harpers magazine C/D

"Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony (Variations on a Descending Theme)" by Thomas Frank

and the Wallace piece...

"Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage"

I think the first Harper's I read had Delillo's Pafko at the Wall in it.

For all of its self-proclaimed defiance of formula, Alternative was also a fairly transparent fake, a caricature of the "independent" rock world that had arisen in the aftermath of punk in the late 1970s, and as long as Alternative cavorted and growled on the national stage it was handicapped by the fact that it was aping, and in considerable detail, something that had happened years before. All pop music, of course, is fabricated to a greater or lesser degree by the music industry, but Alternative was of an entirely different order of fake than, say, the concoctions of Phil Spector. What gave independent rock the modicum of authenticity it had was not its practitioners' fondness for goatees or some special way that they played their guitars but the fact that it did not appear on major labels, that it did not assent to or participate in the machinery of celebrity or star manufacture. Alternative adopted indie's anti-fake postures and noises as a way to capture its authenticity but simultaneously dropped indie's anti-industry bias, thus becoming something bizarre: fakeness at a second remove. The mainstream media's fawning coverage of Alternative bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jane's Addiction--bands it pretended to find genuinely surprising and in whose snarls and styles it affected to discover something self-evidently authentic and refreshingly different from the usual mainstream offerings--pushed the whole discussion to a third remove of fakeness. And then came Alternative's obituaries, produced so soon after its discovery that in many cases they bore the byline of the same writer who introduced readers to this daring and fulfilling new form back in 1993. These articles blamed Alternative's demise on the fact that it wasn't authentic enough, that it was too quickly commercialized--in other words, that it was too quickly written up by the writers themselves! Here was fakeness at a fourth remove.

This is where Chris Holmes came in. The race to anoint a successor to Alternative was on in rock theory, and a phalanx of more-or-less imaginary movements was flickering across the anxious pages of industry trade journals. There was, of course, "post-rock," with its predictable diagnosis of paradigm exhaustion and its even more predictable celebration of cross-genre experimentation; but let us not forget "cocktail nation," with its hints of swinging suburban intoxication; or"lo-fi," with its funky repudiation of technology) or "slo-core," with its . . . slowness. Chris's qualifying lap had gone well, and Atlantic had every reason to believe that this son of Lake Bluff could deliver the authenticity product that would bring middle-class America back to the malls in search of its soul.

The cultural-economic logic that has permitted shoppers at the Piggly Wiggly in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to buy infused vinegars and has brought microbrews to every hamlet in Illinois has erected an enormous lifestyle palace called Piere's ("The Best in National Concerts") in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and when, one Friday night in August 1996, Chris Holmes and his curious vision of pop music were summoned there, I went with him. At the time, Piere's was a lone, brave outpost of Alternative Nation, a vast theme park of a bar occupying an entire corner of a Fort Wayne strip mall where the authenticity-products of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were trucked in and ladled out to the ravenous consumer heartland. A closer examination of the place, after we were guided in by cellular phone and had unloaded Chris's van, revealed that Piere's was, in fact, five separate bars, each dedicated to the safe pursuit of whatever subcultural practice appealed to one's particular demographic. The main hall, where Chris was to play, showed signs of having only recently been converted to Alternative: banners advertising a local Alternative radio station--96.3 THE EDGE: FORT WAYNE'S NEW ROCK ALTERNATIVE--were everywhere, but a little detective work in the hall revealed tattered stickers for a less urbane pop paradigm--ROCK 104: KICKIN' ASS!

This piece, as much as any other I've read, defines the '90s for me (also see the excellent Hermenaut "Fake Authenticity Issue").

I don't know that Frank is on an authenticity-or-die trip; I think he's as confused as the rest of us people who readily admit they're products of their own time but still feel a sense of melancholy and curiosity about this Good and what it must be like. If it's suffocating, it's just reflecting its environment.

Sorry; forgot to mark this as a quote in the last post.

Frank doesn't really seem to know what he wants to argue: did he think that Chris Holmes should have been one of the country's economic/political/cultural mandarins, as he would be his fate in generations past? Are the shit-kickers Holmes plays in front of morons, or victims? Are people who like Kansas City jazz BAD, or what?

The Village Voice did a hilarious little piece on it that basically said: Chris Holmes? A VICTIM of the culture industry? Why, he's the schmooziest motherfucker in Chicago! The bunny suit was of a piece with the rest of his career -- he'd do ANYTHING to be famous! Also...Tom Frank invokes the intentional fallacy in a completely self-serving way in front of an editor of a libertarian journal (how embarrassing) here; Suck spares him no mercy here.

Tom Wolfe is another reason I distrust Harper's, btw. THEY PUT THAT FUCKING HACK WHO GOT LUCKY ALONGSIDE MARK TWAIN ON THEIR ANTHOLOGY FOR CHRISSAKES!

That's not what I got from the piece at all; I felt that Frank was sort-of-impressed-sort-of-repulsed by Chris Holmes' vision/string-pulling, but I think he paints him as this one guy in the middle of the mid-'90s whirlwind of crackpot intentions and mad marketing schemes, not a genius or a victim, just a part of the corporate culture.

Are the shit-kickers Holmes plays in front of morons, or victims? Are people who like Kansas City jazz BAD, or what?

No, they're just people. They're not dumb, or hyper-"authentic" or anything, they're just Americans. I think Frank pretty much succeeds at keeping his condescension in check. His point is that here is regular perfectly normal Culture A, and the alternaboom/cyberculture is at such a critical mass among people who care about that sort of thing (Culture B) that it's become this 800-pound mutant corporate gorilla (Culture C) and Culture C has stomped into this market where Culture A is actually quite content with its cowboy hats and classic rock and doesn't need Yum-Yum.

It's like:

Culture C: "You want this!!"
Culture A: *shrug*

The piece shows why Culture C in many ways failed to reach the all-important Culture A, and why even Culture B eventually gave up. And Chris Holmes was caught somewhere between B and C, which I think makes him a great and fascinating subject.

Frank neglects to point out (and I'm sort of glad -- we get to create the punchline ourselves) that Yum-Yum's Dan Loves Patti is completely unremarkable and forgettable.

Has no-one given luv for Harper's Index? I love the hell of of Harper's Index.

I don't see the problem?

Lapham's pomposity is a few orders of magnitude more obnoxious than Hertzberg's - so Hertzberg wins.

I actually applied for one. I didn't get it, but I think I was in the running. The application process is very rigorous, very research-intensive (or at least it was in 1998). I'm not sure what's so spectacular about the internship itself, though...

This is like a quoting a guy talking about computer hardware saying "this videocard can display anything from sunflowers to pornography" and going -- "Look! He's erasing the moral distinction between sunflowers and pornography!"

The whole article is like one long beating by an obvious stick.

I'm generally not terribly interested in its arts coverage.

You're wrong though, because although Wallace is historically a SNOOT/prescriptivist, he's not insisting descriptivism is any kind of plague on academia. The point of his article (if you'll allow me to be really obvious for a second) is that it's a review of this usage guide by this language authority named Garner. Garner is, like Wallace, historically a SNOOT/prescriptivist, but his Dictionary of Modern American Usage is notably more democratic-minded than any major prescriptivist usage guide that has come before it -- this is urgent and key to DFW's argument. Wallace lauds Garner for his ability to be "extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist putdown."

Wallace goes on to talk about descriptivism -- he's still unpacking his argument by insisting Garner's being too charitable to descriptivists, but Wallace is playing devil's advocate in order to prove himself wrong later in the piece (when his "ethical appeal" to his black student comes back to bite him in the ass and he finally capitulates and admits that It's Not That Simple).

Descriptivists, on the other hand, don't have weekly columns in the Times. These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of structural (or "descriptive") linguistics, they are doctrinaire positivists who have their intellectual roots in the work of Auguste Comte and Ferdinand de Saussure and their ideological roots firmly in the U.S. sixties. The brief explicit mention Garner's Preface gives this crew--

Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries got hijacked by the
descriptive linguists.(16) who observe language scientifically. For the
pure descriptivist, it's impermissible to say that one form of language is
any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it's OK--and
anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead.... Essentially,
descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems.
Descriptivists want to record language as it's actually used, and they
perform a useful function--though their audience is generally limited to
those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research.

--is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the "approaching different problems" part, because it vastly underplays the Descriptivists' influence on U.S. culture. For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively--via "freewriting," "brainstorming," "journaling," a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today's socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males(17) and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid he as a generic pronoun, or of the tense deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.'s. Think of today's endless battles over just the names of things---"Affirmative Action" vs. "Reverse Discrimination," "Pro-Life" vs. "Pro-Choice," "Undercount" vs. "Vote Fraud," etc.

He's pretty harsh on the descriptivists (and I agree with most of what he says, but that's a different post for a different time), and that fact does contradict his case for Garner's even-handed approach -- but he does talk about ways that non-standard English can be useful (where the colloquial usage seems to make more grammatical sense than the standard usage), and he emphasizes that SWE is ONLY ONE DIALECT out of many, so he's willing to make some allowances, obviously.

But DFW doesn't impress me and Lapham is easily not as cool as Hertzberg.

Ebonics was a culturally bizzare outlier made up for the purpose of a grant application and black/latino california race politics rather than indicitave of some "education trend" but Wallace picks up the mediascare just like everyone else and uses it to try and prove his point. Also if he understood the "Ebonics" controversy at all, he'd recognize that even the schoolboard wasn't asking to make special concessions to nonstandard dialect but rather hamfistedly trying to get money to help teach standard english with the recognition that the students weren't coming from that background -- i.e. in a skewed way exactly what Wallace was saying and actually slightly LESS racially problematically than how he presented it in his class.

Well, it was a "culturally bizarre outlier" at first, but the debates certainly didn't end there -- it doesn't matter anymore that the idea was concocted as a way to get grant money, because once it was a news item it got EVERYBODY talking about things like whether it was even correct to assume that there was a single "black dialect" that could be used to compare it with SWE when teaching.

In an era when great capitalists built railroads and Horatio Alger fables were read straight, the natural career choice for a young man with the abilities, education, and social standing of my friend Chris Holmes would have been corporate management or perhaps the law.

As for condescension:

To party with the Pierites on a Friday night was to realize both their distance from the dainty rebellion of all the urban bohemias and how effectively their cultural lives had been reduced to acts of pure consumption...Their Midwest wasn't about prayer or hard work, conformity or Main Street martinets, and it was even less about the clever commentary of pop ideology. It was about drunkenness, cocaine, and copulation; it was about that sense of futility that Hamlin Garland and Theodore Dreiser knew so well, that acid midwestem nihilism that sends one back Friday after Friday and that, for a brief moment at least, made the growling pseudo-nihilism of Alternative the winner in the local authenticity sweepstakes.

A closer examination revealed the buildings to be elaborate false-front exteriors constructed for the 1996 film Kansas City, Robert Altman's decidedly unironic homage to the underworld of the Thirties; the sign was an artifact not of some beautifully uncorrupted and ultra-authentic bohemia of 1936 but of the pathetic modern day longing of an American filmmaker and his white, suburban audience to participate vicariously in such a subculture.

Sounds pretty damned condescending to me. At best you could say that the first passage is a pox on everyone's house, the "heartland" and it supposed alternative. (It also happens to be both cutting AND maudlin, quite a feat.) And Jesus...the scene where he wrinkles his little nose over Holmes' record collection!

"Some say the cause of WWI was economic. [gives some reasons] Some say it was political. [gives some reasons] But all these explanations are too simplistic and in fact the causes were a combination of both."

Like two silly reductionist arguments that nobody really makes and ooh! he sees good and bad points to both and therefore is sooooooo smart.

Perfect material for making you feel like you've learned something without actually telling you anything.

I never get a sense that Thomas Frank has struggled to gain knowledge of the people he writes about with such affected authority, like the audiences that came to see Yum-Yum in Fort Wayne, etc. I picture him standing in the corner of the club, picking up on the vagaries of people's clothing, body language, etc., while not bothering to speak to anyone lest they exhibit more nuance or sophistication than he imagines, or lest they simply upset his ideas about what they're there for.

Also one thing absent from most of his writing is any sense of the pleasures that culture can provide. Everywhere Frank looks there is something horribly wrong with the relationship between people and the culture they "consume."

I find his writing totally unsympathetic, even given the spare revelations it contains. There's something of the Chicken Little in him.

I miss Lingua Franca too, and I think the rightward slant of AL Daily (God we are geeks) has always been there, it's just become more pronounced

Noticed how News and Letters Daily's been going more rightward since it got bought out from the corpse of Lingua Franca?
Yes. It's sad.

Or is it just that the world is moving rightward?
There needs to be a (very long and involved) thread started about how this myth is actually going to be self-actualizing (ick, sorry) if we don't start being careful about the cheap titillation we get out of scaring ourselves by bandying it about.

I prefer the depth of Atlantic Monthly articles (e.g. the recent piece on Bobby Fischer) although I think most of these older general interest magazines are stuffy, overly focused on "taste-making," and incredibly insular, ensconced in the world of monolithic publishers and agencies--overlooking the diamonds in the rough in the world of independent publishers. Of course I read all of them anyway.

For me, Harper's is too hit and miss to be either C or D.

I more or less forgot about this magazine for a few years but picked up an issue recently and was very impressed. Kevin Baker piece on Giuliani and Kozol piece on back-door school privatization both fantastic. It's only $12 a year to subscribe (vs. like $7 for one newsstand issue!), so I'm going to rejoin the club.

Pretty much everything else I think about it has already been said better upthread - Lapham is a twat, magazine is hit or miss, too much gloom and wailing, etc. I like the Readings section sometimes but not when it's all "Haha, look at the shitty poem!"

Lapham's on only every other month now. I really liked the last editorial on the privatization of public education.

This is pretty much the only magazine I read. I'm a big fan.

The "Hard Man" thing from that issue was pretty lousy, tho.

its been going down hill since that new editor. theres like 2 questionably sourced environmental articles every issue now and the writing seems worse. i mean its still good, but it was the best - not sure if thats true anymore.

did you know ifn yr a subscriber you can download every issue ever as a pdf! look out for hours of life lost.

The Baker and Kozol pieces were both really good.

OMG jhosea I did not know that! This is as good as when I got those Mad CD-ROMs in junior high!

Has anyone ever read Baker's novels? I'm curious now.

I've been debating whether to subscribe to this or The Atlantic.

Thoughts?

harpers is like 1mx better

Despite all the stuff you mentioned upthread?

they are both worthwhile. the atlantic has good stuff in it on a regular basis. same as harper's.

harpers rules. i used to have a subscription but don't anymore. it's one of the magazines i miss the most. i might have even liked it more than Mother Jones but can't really remember cause i haven't got one of those in like two months now

from last month, this is a worthwhile article about detroit's urban decay.

I guess it's settled then.

harper's is the only magazine i subscribe to. when it's a hit, it's a real hit.

i don't like the Atlantic's font/layout very much. that and they seem to come to a lot of issues later on in the game?

I just subscribed and am currently reading "How To Kill Clever Children" from the May 1858 issue.

oh Big Hoos, do read the article by Vollman from 04 or 05 about the secret Chinese tunnels running from socal to mexico. it's the best thing harper's published in the past three or four years, i think.

in fact, if you'd post that entire article, i might make a fun image involving your handle.

i used to like harper's during the clinton era because it was one of the few mags "on the left" that routinely took his admin to task when they were doing bullshit things. once bush took over, it seemed less interesting because there was no shortage of mags calling the repubs out for their crimes & misdemeanors

that and lapham's haughty contrarianism started to get old afetr a while

Lapham never bothered me much. i always liked him for taking new york to task and saying, 'shame!!' to city administrations once in a while. he is a pretty good writer at certain points.

"post that entire article"? in what way?

$12 for a year's subscription?! wow. I usually lift them when I'm reading one in a doctor's office or somewhere and find myself engrossed. But at that price I could stand to get them legit.

I read a great and v. scary piece not long ago about how the Religious Right is "reimagining" U.S. history to dovetail with the theory that Americans (specifically born-again crackas) are the rightful heirs to the "Chosen People" distinction.

When I got the subscrip today it was $17, but still. That's a helluva deal.

i got a two-year subscription a couple months ago. the magazine today is usually a good read. but the real reason to subscribe is the access to every issue.

the best thing to ever appear in harpers (at least in my lifetime) were walter karp's articles on politics in the 1980s. "coolidge redux," "liberty under siege," "all the congressmen's men" - all very powerful and damning stuff, serious analysis of how the reagan admin was destroying fundamental american liberties and how the press blithely ignored what was happening. his essay "the two americas" is also the best essay on patriotism you'll ever read, by anyone. when lapham waxes eloquent about the decline of our rome-like empire etc etc and trotting out the gibbon quotes, he's trying his hardest to channel karp. (he's not even a tenth as good, but he gets an eternal pass in my book for publishing WK in the first place when virtually no other magazines would.)

guys this archive of forever is AWESOME!

I didn't even know James Baldwin published the essay that became Notes of a Native Son in Harper's first!

fyi guys my first issues of the atlantic and harper's came in today

this month's centerfold is hott- semi-nude Thomas Frank!!

i subscribed because of the archive of forever

ill subscription, BIG HOOS.

i just subscribed. HOORAY!

Crikey, a subscription to Norway was much cheaper than I ever suspected. I dare say this bag of rotten innards shall subscribe to dee Harpers post-haste. I'm excited about the online archive.

Is there a thread devoted to pointing out awesome stuff in the archives ala the one we had for the "Complete New Yorker" set?

Holy shit. I clicked buy and one second later it said:

"Your order is complete. You'll receive your first print issue within 6-8 weeks, and in the meantime . . .
LINK TO THE ARCHIVES OMG!!"

Hooray! There's no way I'm going to get anything more done today.

Anyone with some economics background want to weigh in on the bubble cover story? I've only skimmed parts of it so far. The writer's credentials sounded a bit dubious, and the parts I read seemed to alternate between slightly opaque and quite obvious.

The Atlantic >>> Harper's

Oh boy I need to resubscribe, thx for the reminder! (altho it was inadvertent.)

I think every single thing in this month's issue was SPECTACULAR. I keep rereading it...so good.

I just renewed to Harpers after the last issue's Vivian Gornick article (which I read in Barnes + Noble). I had let it relapse about 6 months ago, but I've missed it ever since.

underwhelmed by thomas frank's debut. i was looking forward to it, too, but his polemic about journalism is just blah. no one can replace lewis lapham i guess

too true

gotta say, i love harpers.

Really? I used to hate Lapham's editorials. In fact I felt like he cast such a cranky, doomed pall over the whole magazine that I lost my taste for it. The whole thing started to feel like the Book of Revelation for the highbrow crowd.

I mean, to be clear, not that his editorials alone did that, but that the magazine felt that way under his leadership.

This "Lapham Mad Libs" really cracked me up when it first came out. I am with Hurting – the dude was so histrionic. I let my subscription to Harper's lapse a while ago when I was depressed and got tired of reading a litter of long doomsday pieces every month. Is it still like that?

yeah lapham was ridic, i thought. i kind of can't stand harper's tbh.

i thought their coverage of environmental issues was good if, yeah, a little grim

its not readable cover to cover like the new yorker is tho

i am sure their coverage of a lot of stuff is good; i always feel like i'm not a serious enough person when i try to read it. the last time i tried to read it was a while ago.

imo under lapham harpers had the best writing in any magazine, after not so much

haha me too tbh - i mostly just dont have money for magazines really - but i never loved their politics or arts coverage

still think remnick's new yorker is the best written general interest magazine

really - see i feel the opposite - i can't finish an issue of the New Yorker, but most issues of Harpers are solid front to back

well the new yorker panders to my yuppie interests so

this month's harpers does have a javier marías short story in it tho

i feel like an asshole saying this but harpers is too 'hard'--i like the new yorker cause its not dumb but its always easy to read on the subway no matter how tired/distracted/whatever i am

well, a significant amount of the New Yorker is about New York, and I live 3000 miles away, so it isn't as interesting to me as if I were to live there.

well the new yorker panders to my yuppie interests so

― .gif of the magi (Lamp), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:27 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
i feel like an asshole saying this but harpers is too 'hard'--i like the new yorker cause its not dumb but its always easy to read on the subway no matter how tired/distracted/whatever i am

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this and this, basically

lapham was good during the clinton years, sorta lost it after that as there was no shortage of bush critics on the left and he went overboard to try to distinguish himself....or something

except i am resentful about the way harper's is "hard" and count it against it

how is it hard?

sometimes i actually get mad when i pick up esquire or whatever and their articles are all PERSONALITY and VOICE and WEIRD STRUCTURE and im like *rolls eyes* *yawn* no way am i getting thru this, never happens with tny

harpers has been way more on point than the new yorker since like the clinton years. lapham called the bush wars and the subprime debacle like a champ. miss him. despite an inauspicious kickoff, looking forward to t. frank growing into his new monthly column. he was breathing fire there at the end of his wall street journal tenure

the Atlantic is harder for me than Harper's - and with The New Yorker I have trouble getting through the opening section with the short pieces

the Atlantic is just bullshit. except for ta-nehisi coates.

sidney blumenthal and adam gopnik drove me away from the new yorker

i feel like even when discussing fairly heavy or difficult or knowledge-intensive subjects new yorker writers opt for a sort of 'hey this is a thing, and here's what i think about it, or something about how it works' style of writing that makes it easy to follow whereas some of the harpers writers will make you 'work for it more' by explaining less or starting from a more privileged place or w/e

also the style of writing is sometime more... ponderous or heavy-handed, i guess?

something about the writing in Harper's is offputting to me, but i can't quite pin it down. last thing i read was an indictment of the test-prep industry (i think?), which seems right on except something about the tone was so self-aggrandizing i wasn't even sure if the dude was indicting the test-prep industry or just letting us know how awesome he was. probably that is a totally unfair assessment, and that article is years old at this point, but that's how harper's reads to me.

gopnik is terrible, true. sometimes i'll start reading an article by him without realizing it, but i can always tell by like three sentences in.

I usually skipped Lapham's editorials. Histrionic and usually borderline unreadable. Rest of the magazine is routinely A++++ and not so doomsday-y, IMO.

I usually read it at lunch, so I have a tendency to skip the fiction and some of the stuff in the back (and then never get back around to reading it at home).

hmm - that could be true - i'd say ponderous is a good description. The feature articles in the New Yorker are fine - it's just the other stuff, like reviews of NYC things or gossip-y kinda stuff about celebrities that I have trouble with, because I don't know those things or who those people are.

i think i also resent that i'm "supposed" to know (and care) about these people and places - the cultural currency of NYC

love the new yorker but their writing often gets factoids/shit people talk abt at parties/npr ish- like theres nothing really there just a collection of shiny fascinating info objects

sure, i mostly skim talk of the town and dont check the listing since i moved.

i have a soft spot for gopnik just because i kinda feel like he reps for airily 'literary' know-nothing yale undergrad strain in the new yorker. i mean where else is someone named deirdre foley-mendelssohn going to get their big break?

i do regularly skip the poetry

feeling the attention to narrative and fancy advertising in vanity fair atm tbh

gopnik is just always like, "my family is PRECIOUS. we live in MANHATTAN. we used to live in PARIS." and it's like, god, who cares. i can't really argue with the "shiny objects" take on the new yorker, though; that's p much where i live.

but be serious the only time my reading doesnt originate on twitter/ilx is when im in the air

i really liked the Harpers article about airports from earlier this year

yeah i love to know facts, who doesnt

i love facts and particularly factoids more than pretty much anyone to be sure

gopnik is awful. really all of the nyers back of the book "critic" types are, with the exception of like... lane, ross, schjeldahl. wood i guess.

when i feel bludgeoned by a bunch of irrelevant facts, I get resentful and my head starts to hurt -- kinda like scrolling through one of those huge ilx mega-poll threads with hundreds of nominations.

gopnik was/is a favorite of tina browns. basically all of her pet writers--gladwell, susan orlean--always have the worst articles in tny

yeah wood makes me mad a lot, but i think he does his job.

up until a few years ago their politics were kinda suspect, too, and the jefferey goldberg iraq war runup stuff is kinda unforgiveable

i think i feel like i'm expected to learn and remember all of them, and it reminds me that my memory does in fact have a maximum capacity

oh god, i hate gladwell

all that being said its the best magazine out right now. i mean it comes out once a week!! once a week!

right?

haha yah i probably like the new yorker so much bcuz you can reliably outline any article youve just read during a lull in dinner conversation

is schjeldahl writing abt architecture for them? they had someone who was really lucid and smart writing abt that for them for awhile but i cant remember who it was. also joan acocella isnt that bad w/ some of the non-fiction reviews. never really read her dance stuff tho

that's too often for me - once a month is just fine.

but you bring the issues you haven't finished on vacation/on the subway with you and it is v soothing!

something about the writing in Harper's is offputting to me, but i can't quite pin it down. last thing i read was an indictment of the test-prep industry (i think?), which seems right on except something about the tone was so self-aggrandizing i wasn't even sure if the dude was indicting the test-prep industry or just letting us know how awesome he was

I was just thinking about that Kaplan's test prep article earlier this week. I thought it was a pretty interesting window into the world of 'teaching' without any training at all. It seemed more like a "here's my story (that just happens to be about this one job that I was really under-trained for just like everyone else who does it)," rather than "EXPOSED: the standardized test war machine's secret underworld." I was thinking about the one girl who did come back for his offer of extra coaching, and their long one-on-one session, how he had no idea how it ended up (but probably fruitless). Just evocative of a hard to express feeling. It reminded me of my very favorite EVER Harper's first-person-account type article, the guy who wrote about going to a Hummer enthusiast camp with his Hummer-loving brother. Harper's is ON when it's on. I should start subscribing again.

i like acocella a lot on dance and everything else

oh yeah their architecture critic is pretty good. paul goldberg. and acocella is ok.

i mean tbrr when i say i hate their critics i mean i hate david denby and nancy franklin and adam gopnik so. take that with a grain of salt. and i am starting to hate sfj too.

i don't take the subway, and i only go on vacation once a decade

Prefer Hertzberg's blog on the magazine site to his column tbh.

TNY can even afford to be uneven. This week's issue had some perfectly okay reviews of the Angels Over America revival and about a new strain of tuberculosis. The rest I didn't care about. That's the good thing: if you don't get to one issue, you can toss it without feeling guilty.

but you bring the issues you haven't finished on vacation/on the subway with you and it is v soothing!

― horseshoe, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:55 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah for real. harpers is too intense!! cant read that shit lounging at my parents house eating artisan bacon or whatever. nyer makes me feel good abt being upper middle class.

susan orleans twitter is p amusing - she just talks abt how much she loves her ipad and complains abt writers block - v unpretentious

your take is probably more accurate than mine, Abbott. sounds like i was confused about what the article was supposed to be doing. there's a lot of that "here's my story" approach in Harper's. it confuses me!

i think that many unread back issues would make me feel anxious and guilty

i only want to hear your story if you live in manhattan and paris

gopnik is awful. really all of the nyers back of the book "critic" types are, with the exception of like... lane, ross, schjeldahl. wood i guess.

OTM. Lane is awful too, but it's easy to look good next to David Denby. Wish they would hand all the film coverage to Brody or even Rafferty.

I cheat though: I read a third of TNY online before my issue arrives.

You definitely should. I really liked Dan Baum's piece about gun ownership from a few months ago, and that article about religion in the military from last year was incredible too. At least every issue has something I dig. xp to Abbott

susan orleans twitter is p amusing - she just talks abt how much she loves her ipad and complains abt writers block - v unpretentious

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:57 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha her twitter is what made me start to hate her. i used to like her articles but seeing her unvarnished personality on her twitter made me start to look for all her terrible twitter quirks in her articles. also did u know she wrote a book about how nice it is to be thin under a pseudonym. f u susan orlean.

And holy shit why are people updating the Harpers magazine C/D thread so quickly at 11:00 PM EST Wednesday night???

i like anthony lane! he makes me lol!

i should stop defending Lane because i never read him/watch movies anymore but i just kind of love him forever.

his article about the ny times bestseller list is so funny u guys

Lane's review of Legalos from LOTR being like Fred Astaire was A+lulz

their current politics guys are all p good--not perfect but--lizza, packer, hertzberg, toobin. steve coll and amy davidson. coll went to my college btw.

current fave staff writer: david grann.

And holy shit why are people updating the Harpers magazine C/D thread so quickly at 11:00 PM EST Wednesday night???

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm "writing a paper"

And as much as I like Schjeldahl and Wood, it seems like they both just sorta settled in at the NYer and mostly coast. I almost always prefer their writing in other venues.

tons of x-ps

Much of Lane's elan has vanished -- it's like he used up all his zingers reviewing Brent Ratner movies.

that article about religion in the military from last year was incredible too

Oh man, that one was great.
My problem was I felt so many articles had just succumbed to Millenarian thinking, which I had always kind of thought of as 1. one of the most fucked strains in modern thinking and 2. totally right wing so why was it always shitting in my Harper's???

lol at the fast short NYT conversations and the long Harper's one getting caught in the crossfire

love the new yorker but their writing often gets factoids/shit people talk abt at parties/npr ish- like theres nothing really there just a collection of shiny fascinating info objects

― ice cr?m, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:45 PM Bookmark

Yeah, this. They get too heavy on irrelevant curiosities in a lot of issues, and they're not even very curious curiosities a lot of the time. A friend of mine told me she was once accosted by a Frenchman in the subway who told her that he thought the New Yorker stood for nothing, and he's sort of right. When it doesn't have Seymour Hersh or at least Hendrik Hertzberg it can feel a little too aimless and comfortable (and yet not even sexy or truly indulgent). Still, when it's on the writing is better there than in any other magazine. I guess I'd like to see someone split the difference between NYer and Harper's.

I loved The Baffler when I was younger but it was a long time ago that I was still reading it and I don't know if I'd dig it in the same way. I think I've outgrown that kind of smirking, griping, generally unproductive take on the world but haven't figured out what to replace it with.

his article about the ny times bestseller list is so funny u guys

Funnier than Gore Vidal's, which is a real achievement.

Lane is really funny! He's just dumb about movies and seems to have little interest in them. There's a reason that NYT Best Seller piece is the one everyone always mentions.

see max, I think that's where we differ - I like the intensity of Harpers. That is one of the main reasons I read. And i don't think it's that intense -- really -- compared to books.

also did u know she wrote a book about how nice it is to be thin under a pseudonym. f u susan orlean.

yeah, i kinda was hating her before that but that sealed it

feel like w/lane youre generally like 'i enjoy this ott funny man' then occasionally you stop and notice that he writes better than pretty much everyone else at that publication and yr all 'oh you sly dog'

I mean, if I wanted to just chill at my parents and eat artisanal bacon, I'd probably just watch one of their hundreds of cable tv channels

Loved Lane's longer features on writers and directors. He should write more: Clair Denis, Assayas, de Oliveira, etc.

man some of that aimless comfy stuff is their best work! i mean thats what john mcphee DOES. i cant read sy hersh every week, speaking of aimless, his thing on the cyber war was basically nothing.

he is a great writer! he seems fun, too; would kick it with

xxp about lane

this thread is confirming what an unserious person i am

And holy shit why are people updating the Harpers magazine C/D thread so quickly at 11:00 PM EST Wednesday night???

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I know right? Are we ready to be excited about magazines again? Do we long for the days when everyone was enthusiastically babbling about them instead of even more meaningless internet stuff? FWIW I like to think of the "Readings" section as a primitive version of the internet.

dont get me wrong i dig harpers but the new yorker has conditioned my magazine reading so well that i cant do anything but tny-style straightforward easy-reading beard-stroking stuff

you probably read more printed material than i do, though

i like long-form journalism a lot, feel like there used to be a lot of it i read, now i just read the new yorker.

Recommend Eleanor Roosevelt article in food issue btw. Totally entertaining, and yet serves as a clear window to history (strokes beard).

i used to read books of academic essays, now i just read Harpers

i met david remnick once btw, he probably used to be a nice guy, but now he is "the editor of the new yorker" and all that entails in 2010

anyone read The New York Review of Books regularly? Until buying a teacher's subscription last week, I'd go to the library on my lunch hour and read it.

that clarifies a lot! i used to blow off reading books of academic essays.

xxp

Yeah I used to read a lot more longform nonfiction too. But it's really hard to say what's the internet and what's me getting older.

i ended my nyrb subscription I STILL FEEL GUILTY ABOUT IT, OKAY?

also did u know she wrote a book about how nice it is to be thin under a pseudonym. f u susan orlean.

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 10:58 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

see im not saying that i like her but this lil piece of info has only increased my enjoyment of her persona

so many words in the nyrb

e.g. -- those insect-like hairs on the back of my shoulders: the internet, or just me getting older?

NRYB is great. Probably the closest thing to the Harpers/NYer hybrid Hurting suggested upthread.

i like the nyrb too. love the format, there need to be more big-ass paper magazines out there.

who am i kidding - i spend way more time reading ilx than reading Harpers

haha

i like long-form journalism a lot, feel like there used to be a lot of it i read, now i just read the new yorker.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dece long form links via tweets http://twitter.com/#!/longformorg

re: nyrb it is really good but i could never collect the proper attention span for it--super-alert without being distractable. maybe i'll re-subscribe when i'm done with school.

the last lane piece i really loved was one he did on flying in europe in the cheap. i think richard brody is really great film critic cant understand why they wont give him denby's job

haha my grandparents have a subscription to vanity fair so i end up taking like six issues home with me when i go for dinner. and im always completely enthralled by its entire presentation - so slick and seamless and terrible

also the new yorker politics podcast is really great imo - perfect listen biking to work

ty jho!

yeah, lapham was ridiculously, punishingly one-note there for a while. not surprising to see that someone devised that madlib thing. at the same time, i feel like i can't blame him. i mean, it was just difficult to formulate some sensible reaction to the bush years without coming off like a total crank

harper's usually comes up with at least one great long article profiling some odd cultural nook every issue. atlantic is slim pickings tho, i think. new yorker seems to have one really good piece each month or so. the rest of it, blah

tbh what i find most oppressive/doomsday about harper's, far more so than i did lapham's essays, is the index, which relates the story of the world as being even way more depressing and horrible than i would have been inclined to conceive

some of thomas frank's stuff is good and all, but i have felt somewhat alienated from his writing ever since reading a piece he did in the baffler a dozen years or so ago which seemed to amount to an extended rant of envy and bitterness regarding chicago "yuppies/hipsters"

seriously who is denby fucking?

The full page ads for Norton and the NYRB editions offer instant self-gifting ideas.

xp - i think i remember reading that baffler piece and loving it.

The least surprising surprising thing about recent issues of the NYROB: their genuine shock at the rise of the Tea Party. Lots of thoughtful brow furrowing over its origins, etc.

I think, "Okay, guys, I know you're elites but..."

p sure denby is a tina brown thing too

she 'saved' the magazine but she also kind of ruined it

i always buy vanity fair when i'm at the airport and luxuriate in its trashiness

brown also hired lane, tbf

I'm also much more about reading economics/business-related stuff than I used to be. I often go for the Times business section, I read Felix Salmon's blog even though I don't always understand it, occasionally the FT or WSJ (though I avoid paying for the latter because of its owner). In my Baffler-Harpers days I would have just mocked all that stuff.

About those insect hairs...

i am now like twenty posts behind but:

i put the nyrb in with stuff like n+1 - its generally 'good' but has an initial barrier to entry high enough that i cant read it on the reg

anyone else read Bookforum? I used to subscribe to Artforum, and generally felt dissatisfied, then read that blog piece comparing Artforum to Vogue - but Bookforum I always liked.

holy fuck at the number of xposts i thought ilx was broken there for a second

seriously who is denby fucking?

he's addicted to porn iirc

so unsurprising

The full page ads for Norton and the NYRB editions offer instant self-gifting ideas.

Haha, yeah, the book ads are one of the best things about the NYRB. It's like middlebrow Vanity Fair!

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

she wasnt throwing the party in the photocopier, i think she was throwing it in her apt probably

I genuinely can't understand a lot of the writing in Artforum. I'm not sure if it's just nonsense or what. I think Jerry Saltz said he thinks it's sort of nonsense, which at least makes me feel better.

i think i've already reported on ilx how gleeful i felt when i learned denby and his wife were getting a divorce /sociopath

i like long-form journalism a lot, feel like there used to be a lot of it i read, now i just read the new yorker.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dece long form links via tweets http://twitter.com/#!/longformorg

― ice cr?m, Thursday, 18 November 2010 04:09 (4 minutes ago)

http://longreads.com/

new york magazine can be p good if u live in ny

i liked the Robert Gottlieb-era NYer, really couldn't deal with tina brown's version

my sister who lives in nyc and is an aspiring longform journalist has high hopes for the revamped new york magazine

you kinda have to keep up with the latest trends in art crit theory for Artforum to make complete sense

ugh bookforum's entire conception of literature seems to exist just to annoy the fuck outta me.

i really like the tone and scope of the lrb but only read that online

i didnt know ur sister was a writer horseshoe

yah she's the best!

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

i thought i had a snappy one-liner for this but i kinda just feel dead inside

this thread is making me want to launch a magazine tbh

would have been worth going to hang out with harry evans imo

you guys should all write for it

and Kazin, the Trillings, Sontag, etc.

xpost

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lmfao, this is symbolic of something i cant quite put my finger on

I Love Everything would be a good name for a magazine imo.

let me review tv for ur magazine horseshoe i will start beef with nancy franklin

i support max over nancy franklin

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

she wasnt throwing the party in the photocopier, i think she was throwing it in her apt probably

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM Bookmark

xeroxes of this rogue's gallery of asses would indeed be awful

if there was only some outlet for max to start a beef w/nancy franklin in *sigh*

omg yes! i relinquish the nyer tv job to u, btw, max <3

that makes it sound like i'm secretly nancy franklin. i'm not, you guys!

sure sure

it is so agonizing to think you might be mistaken for nancy franklin

max can review tv shows and vegetable oils

nancy franklin still better than troy patterson. slightly.

nancy franklin is as humorless on twitter as she is in tny

I want to play the role of SFJ, only I will review things like kiltie bands, early music ensembles and german artsong singers for the now crowd instead of the other way around.

aw i like troy patterson

the thing abt sfj is that im already annoyed w/e he is writing abt wasnt something given to alex ross (although he barely writes anything but mostly mozart heads-ups atp)

i like the new yorker a lot, i subscribe to it and am really behind

what i really like is their anthology of profiles

i fucken love tha tbook

and you know i understand the gopnik rage but his piece in that about his psychiatrist 'guy goes to see a doctor' is really good

http://books.google.ca/books?id=ik0uYgetE3oC&lpg=PA483&ots=f4CrthogXb&dq=max%20grosskurth&pg=PA482#v=onepage&q&f=false

fyi

i like the new yorker a lot, i subscribe to it and am really behind

what i really like is their anthology of profiles

i fucken love tha tbook

― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:40 PM

had no idea this existed but it looks dope! thx

well-timed thread. we subscribed to tny, harpers, and vf like three months ago. knew what we were getting with vf--it's hilarious. tny has been mildly disappointing to me--i admit i'm awful at keeping up with it but it hasn't really been justifying the density-per-issue with actual good articles that i remember a week later. most recent one i read: article about american marathon coach (decent but factoid-y and dinner party material), lonnnng article about elvis costello (jerk), article abt the woman who wrote the play that tyler perry just made a movie of (actually pretty sweet, glad i learned something about her).

i'm really taken with harper's though. i love readings and the index so so much and there has been at least one fantastic article per issue.i'm coming to appreciate their style too--i guess i wasn't sure if there was any deliberately difficult magazine writing left, and i'm glad there is.

Just subscribed again -- fuck it. Cheap, and I'm bored of just having TNY.

speaking of aimless, his thing on the cyber war was basically nothing

Yeah that was super disappointing. So directionless. I wondered if he'd been pushed into that story by someone.

I don't get that Harpers is difficult. It's definitely more "literary" journalism writing tho, like Marilynn Robinson essays aren't out of place in it (or long Franzen screeds about the state of literature).

Can We Prevent Psychosis article is really great

This week's New Yorker looks great, fwiw.

<3 NYer and Harpers, although NYer a little bit more. Harper's features the occasional apocalyptic article about the environment, but tbh very few publications feature anything about the env. that's close to the scale of the problem, so I'm fine with it.

Most annoying thing about NYer is how the 2nd or 3rd paragraph always begins with "____ ____ was born in ___."

Yeah and first line is always like "In a campaign tent pitched on a grassy field in Bend, Oregon last July..."

I definitely prefer Harper's to the New Yorker, though I'm not sure why. The tone of the New Yorker always makes me feel like it's a club I'll never belong to.

Can We Prevent Psychosis article is really great

Also, this^

<3 NYer and Harpers, although NYer a little bit more. Harper's features the occasional apocalyptic article about the environment, but tbh very few publications feature anything about the env. that's close to the scale of the problem, so I'm fine with it.

Most annoying thing about NYer is how the 2nd or 3rd paragraph always begins with "____ ____ was born in ___."

Yes this is classic "profile" structure, it is pretty invariable

man yall were right that article on mental illness was the business

i enjoyed the delillo story in the latest issue too, but yeah the article about psychosis was a super compelling read.
getting my aunt & mother subscriptions tbh.

just started reading this month's issue -- the AA article is really great

Harper’s, one of the last bastions of old-line liberalism and a lonely defender of a certain idea of what literary culture should be, has long been supported by the largesse of its owner publisher and patron, John “Rick” MacArthur, an author and heir to a ceramics fortune who has long supported liberal causes. And now, in a strange, ironic endgame, MacArthur finds himself fighting against his own side: His staff has unionized.

The Harper's union has been locked in a bitter dispute with MacArthur since July. And now he's trying to lay off Harper’s' literary editor, Ben Metcalf, who’s worked at the magazine since the mid-nineties and who played a key role in the union drive — a move the union says is pure retaliation.

The current crisis began a year ago, when MacArthur fired the magazine's editor-in-chief, Roger Hodge. The two men had once been close, but their relationship had frayed as the red ink mounted: Newsstand sales dropped, MacArthur's appetite for losses waned, and Hodge tried to defend the staff from cuts. According to Harper’s' most recent tax filing in 2009, MacArthur invested $4.4 million into the magazine. (In 2006, his losses were only $2.9 million.)

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/01/whats_the_matter_with_harpers.html

"In recent months, we have made significant improvements to the magazine: we hired Thomas Frank to pen the monthly Easy Chair column and Zadie Smith to write the monthly New Books column.

Ok it has been 1 month and I have not gotten my subscription. Does that explain why?

It came.

I liked the piece about gold in French Guyana in a classic adventure story with global concern angle sort of way. Some good stuff in Readings as usual, especially the conversation btw Barry Hannah and Wells Tower (so awesome, esp. where hannah makes fun of movies about the South using slide guitar). Didn't really get the point of the main cover story (ad execs theorize about selling the govt to the people or whatever).

i subscribed before xmas for myself & a few family members, i haven't gotten it yet.. don't think they have either :(

from the archives:http://www.harpers.org/archive/1954/12/0006789

i enjoyed that cover story precisely because it was kind of random and frivolous

Zadie Smith's New Books column is really fucking good. I'm starting to look forward to it every month, and it makes me really want to read whatever she is talking about. Edward St. Aubyn is definitely queued up for post-bar reading now.

how the fuck is anyone supposed to do these damn puzzles

a question i ask myself without fail each month

Kalfus' Coup de Foudre about DSK was a really bold thing to try to pull off. Anyone else read it? I'm not sure how I feel about whether it was successful or a flop in the end, but it def had moments throughout, although a great deal of the suspense was admittedly "will this concept actually work" and in the end I don't think it managed to sufficiently elevate itself above trash journalism?